'Local Leftist Media Harms Israel's Hasbara'

Media analyst Chanie Luz: Israel needs to take a look at how its leftist-slanted media affects the way Israel is perceived globally.

By Elad Benari & Yoni Kempinski

First Publish: 1/18/2012, 8:23 AM

Chanie Luz, media analyst and founder and director of TADMIT, an organization which works toward enhancing democracy in Israeli media, said on Tuesday that Israel needs to look at its own media to see what a great influence it has on the way international media perceives the Jewish State.

Speaking to Arutz Sheva on the sidelines of a special session in the Knesset on public diplomacy, Luz said that the way Israel’s media portrays the Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria has a strong influence on how Israel is then perceived internationally.

“Most of the media outlets in Israel are very one-sided,” Luz said. “They don’t show the whole picture and they close off a lot of the positive aspects of the life of settlers. They show a picture that is not a true picture.”

She said that this one-sidedness affects Israel’s public diplomacy and added, “What we heard here first hand is that journalists get a lot of their information from the Israeli media, especially Israeli media in English.”

Luz added that outlets such as Haaretz and Ynet are slanted towards the left. “Ynetnews, in both Hebrew and in English, had a title that conveyed a message that the police are warning the public that the right-wing violence is going to get worse in the next year. If you read on, the next sentence said the same thing about the left.”

“The fact that this was the title in English,” said Luz, “made the right-wing seem violent in the eyes of whoever read it in English. This influences the media all around the world, and we know for a fact that 70 percent of people only read the headline. This is the message that they received.”